A machine, such as an excavator, may be equipped with a bucket to perform operations at a work site. Such operations may include, for example, penetrating material in the ground or in a pile to prepare building sites, loading material into trucks or onto conveyors, making cuts through hillsides, digging trenches, and cleaning ditches. The level of performance achieved by an operator using the excavator may depend, at least partially, on one or more parameters of the bucket. Using one particular bucket may provide a level of performance that significantly differs from the level achieved while performing similar operations using a different bucket that has one or more different parameters.
An exemplary machine bucket is disclosed in International Patent Application Publication No. WO 2012113542 to Raaz that published on Aug. 30, 2012 (the '542 publication). Specifically, the '542 publication describes a digging tool for excavators including a sloped, lower back region, a sloped, upper back region, and a concave, middle back region extending between the lower and upper back regions. To prevent material from sticking to inner surfaces of the tool, a radius of the middle back region of the tool increases continuously from the lower back region to the upper back region.
Although the digging tool of the '542 publication may be adequate for some applications, it may still be less than optimal. In particular, because the radius of the middle back region of the tool in the '542 publication increases from its lower back region to its upper back region, a deeper bucket profile is created, which may be less suitable for quick dumping applications. Also, having an increased radius at an upper region of the digging tool of the '542 publication may produce bulkiness and create visibility problems for the operator.
The machine bucket of the present disclosure solves one or more of the problems set forth above and/or other problems of the prior art.